Drash on Noah and the Flood

A drash is an interpretation of text or a teaching based on a passage of the Old Testament (Torah). The portion of the Torah that Jews the world over read this past week was the story of Noah and the flood. In zoom-synagogue, my rabbi shared some thoughts about that story. She reflected on the fact that the Noah family became the first climate chaos refugees, fleeing an uninhabitable environment in their homeland. How many of us will become climate chaos refugees in the future? I will become one soon myself, starting over in a different place from the one I have called home for more than forty years because the California that I love is drying out and burning up before my very eyes. 

My rabbi said that she has difficulty wrapping her head around the fact that God chose to destroy all the other people of Noah’s time because they were all “bad.” She wonders how all of them could actually be so bad that they deserved to perish in the flood. How could God be so heartless as to kill off so many souls, all the humans in creation, except for the Noah family? Without actually believing in a Judaic God as such (wrathful, judgmental, deadly, a monotheistic entity), I still find myself contemplating my rabbi’s question. I agree that it seems extreme for God to destroy all humans except Noah's family. How could all of them be that evil, that deserving of annihilation? 

The purpose of a drash, of course, is to make some sense of a biblical story so that it informs our lives. Here is my sense of the Noah story. The culture and society of humans of Noah’s time had evolved to the point that humans placed themselves above all other species and viewed the planet as a resource for them to exploit. They thought that all the other species, in fact the planet itself, existed to serve the purposes deemed applicable to human desires and endeavors. Earth existed for human profit, human comfort, human amusement. Anything on Earth was there for the taking by humans, with no regard for other life forms. Sadly, many humans live within this mindset today, caring nothing for the preservation of the beauty of Earth or the future generations of humans or any other species that will attempt to live here. They do not recognize “sentience” in other living beings, both animals and plants. How do people not see that trees are sentient beings? This baffles me. How do people so devalue other creatures? I feel spirit flowing throughout everything, as part of a oneness. But I live in a time and a place where humans devalue other humans, let alone recognizing the value of a tree or a bird. I imagine that the people who perished in the flood of Noah’s time were not much different from the many exploitive, self-centered, profiteering people in my time who contribute to climate chaos, and that is why God destroyed all of the people in Noah’s time. Even the best of humans in that society lacked the ability or motivation to alter their perceptions or actions. They believed that they mattered more than all the other creatures on Earth. God doesn’t even need to raise a finger to destroy humans nowadays because we’re doing a good job of it all on our own.

My rabbi explained that Noah is portrayed in the Torah as a humble and unassuming man. He didn’t think he was anything special. He never understood why God chose to save him. He never felt worthy of that, although he tried to live up to the honor. So I would say that God chose one humble man with the potential to learn, and set him and his family afloat for a year on the ark, tasking them with caring for the animals, those other lovely and radiant creatures with whom they shared Earth. God left them on the ark until Noah and his family fully understood that humans must care for other earthly creatures, learn from other earthly creatures, and appreciate other earthly creatures. We must care for the planet and all who live here with us. Exploitation for profit is sinful. We need to be good stewards, and to go even beyond good stewardship to the level of living entirely as a contributing part of the overall Earthly family, interwoven with other species, valuing other creatures, as we share Earth, our mutual home. That is the only way all of us will survive and, if we are lucky, thrive.